COMUNA, work, Independence Day!

So one of the NGOs that’s active in El Chol has started a project to form a Municipal Council of Youth (Consejo Municipl de la Niñez y la Adolescencia or COMUNA). The idea is to teach kids about citizen participation and civic responsibility by having them go through an election process of electing a Municipal Council made up of kids that mirrors the process that adults take part in. The kids made three political parties with candidates for Mayor and Government Plans and then they have to register to vote, have an election day, and then the elected council will participate in the adult-run COMUDE and make proposals to the City Council. As one of the goals of my project of Municipal Development is increasing citizen participation, I've been getting involved with this process. It’s a huge logistical undertaking for the NGO to coordinate 18 schools that are participating, all the teachers, and over 600 kids. They have brought them all together for general assemblies, in which transportation, snacks, and lunches have to be provided. I facilitated one groups of kids when they were creating their Government Plan to run on. We looked at each of the sectors of health, education, environment, recreation, etc. and discussed the problems and realistic solutions in these areas. This whole project is awesome in theory, but in practice it has been rather difficult as it presents a logistical and organizational challenges. Last Sunday all the kids and teachers got together for a forum to present their Government Plans and respond to questions and next week the voting will take place. After the committee is elected, hopefully the kids will participate in the COMUDE meetings and that their opinions will be taken seriously.

So back in February we created nine committees as part of the COMUDE, which are technically required by law and correspond to the committees that the City Council has. However, none of them really function, or rather, we have a list of names on paper that pertain to each committee, but they never meet and never do anything. Well, I’m part of the committee for the Family, Women, and Children (Comisión IX) and we’ve been getting support from an NGO to create a polÌtica p·blica…kind of like a document of needs and short and long-term goals in the sector of youth. We have monthly meetings where we learn about the legal basis that protects kids and promotes their rights, we broke up into sub-committees to do research on various sectors relating to health, education, recreation, etc. with youth, and hopefully soon we will be using this needs assessment to decide on priorities, wrap it up in a pretty little package of a document, and then get the prioritized projects into the budget, and hopefully coordinate with the kids who are elected to the COMUNA so that they have their say and we come with double force to the City Council. We’ll see…

In July we printed our fourth Municipal Newsletter and in September we printed our fifth. They have been going really well and gotten very positive responses. I created an anonymous questionnaire to get some feedback on them, and handed it out during the COMUDE meeting when we distributed the newsletters. Everybody wrote good things and gave me some suggestions for future topics. Recent topics that I have written about include: Get to know the Municipal Code, What are Municipal Incomes, the Formation of the COMUNA, and the printing of the costs for every project executed by the muni in 2008.

At the end of August my good friend Juan Pablo, the civil engineering intern from the University of San Carlos in Guate in our office who was doing his internship here for six months, finished his time here with us. With took the afternoon off and had a nice traditional going away party for him with chicharrones (fried pig skins complete with bristly hairs on some pieces), tortillas, guacamole, salt, rum and cokes, and durenguense music. He will be missed. But we got another civil engineering intern from the USAC, this time a girl! So I’m not the only girl in the office anymore, which is a relief. She’s a lot of fun and buena onda so it’s been a nice change.
A while ago I was taking a shower in a hotel at Lake Atitlan. I was enjoying the experience as the water was incredibly hot and the bathroom was getting very filled with steam. Then I realized that the steam smelled funny and that I could no longer see through it, as which point it occurred to me that it was smoke, not steam. Well I was all soapy at this point and figured I¥d just try to rinse off real quick, but then all of a sudden flames started shooting out of the calentador, the water-heating device connected directly on top of the spout. I immediately turned off the water and started screaming and ran out of the bathroom all soapy in my tiny travel towel to which my friends found hilarious. Only in Guatemala would a shower actually catch on fire.

The other weekend I rode my bike ride to Granados, the next town over about 10 km away down the mountainous dirt road to visit another volunteer who lives there. We had a nice time catching up and sharing the joys and many frustrations of this strange life we live here and chatting about grad schools, careers, and what might come next. We made two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese that she had gotten from the states and ate them both. Delicious. The next day I left to ride back to El Chol and about half way back the sky opened up and I got caught in the heaviest rain that I've seen since I've been here. I arrived home soaking wet like I’d just gotten out of the shower, except covered with mud too and my family got quite the kick out of it. They just think I’m crazy for the things I do sometimes….as it would never occur to them to ride a bike to Granados, especially if it were raining.

Yesterday I went on a walk with my site mate up the mountain here in El Chol. It had been stormy all day, but wasn´t at the moment. As we were walking back down, a bolt of lightning struck right in front of us! I seriously saw it hit the ground right in front of us. We both screamed and grabbed hands and hurried home. It freaked me out so much. I´ve never been afraid of being struck by lightning, but now that I almost died, I am.

So…INDEPENDENCE DAY! in Guatemala was September 15th, celebrating their liberation from Spain in 1821. It was quite the festivity, as most celebrations in Guatemala generally are. They don¥t just celebrate the actual day, but for days leading up to the lead as well. Different communities have different traditions, but in El Chol there were a series of Civic Moments in which the pre-school, primary school, middle school, high school, and teachers put on performances of traditional dances with traditional costumes in the park and then sold all different kinds of typical foods. Each group had their own day on the days leading up to the 15th. These performances were complete with the burning of devil, being someone dressed up in red with a mask with fireworks strapped to them that shot off in all directions. The food for sale was delicious with dobladas (corn dough stuffed, folded, and fried), chuchitos (corn dough cooked in corn husks), tamales (corn dough cooked in a big green leaf with tomato sauce and a piece of pork), bushboles (corn dough cooked in greens), chepes (corn dough with whole black beans), elotes (corn on the cob), atol (hot sweet beverages, sometimes made out of corn), tostados (toppings on a large round tortilla chip), panza (cow stomach), torejas (sweet bread cooked in eggs and honey), ejotes (green beans), pinol (tortilla soup-esque), frutas en conserva (preserved fruits in syrup), caldo de gallina (chicken soup).

In addition to the civic moments, there is the tradition of the schools going on field trips to run and bring the Torch of Peace, kind of like the bringing of the Olympic Torch. It’s a cool tradition because the kids get to travel around their country and for many kids, it’s the only opportunity they have to experience different places outside their community or department. For example, the middle school kids went to Livingston, the GarÌfuna community on the Caribbean coast and one of the elementary schools went to the Biotopo Quetzal a rainforest nature preserve. I had the honor of going on two trips: one with an elementary school to a water park and another with the high school to Panajachel.

I went on one with the elementary school Trapiche Viejo where the mayors wife is the director of the school so she went and the mayor went, in addition to some of the teachers that I know. We met at 2:00 am to get all the kids on the two full school buses that went in addition to a microbus with the rest of us to go to the awesome water park of Xocomil (Sho-co-mill) in the Pacific coastal department of Retalhuleu (Rey-tal-lu-lay-oo). We got there at 10:30 am and played all day on the water slides and wave pool. This place was seriously better than Wild Waves at home. The kids loved every minute of it, even though most of them were too scared to go on the water slides, it was so much fun to enjoy myself in the water (this is the Peace Corps?) and to watch the kids having such a good time. The park being a tourist attraction, there were people from all over Guatemala there and the unwanted attention from guys and adolescent boys for being foreigners walking around in bikinis was a real annoyance. That night we stayed in a dormitory in a multi-sport complex that felt a bit like a homeless shelter with a long room filled with blue metal bunk beds, gross mattresses, dirty bathrooms with no toilet seats (typical because evidently there is a shortage of toilet seats in Guatemala), and tons of women and children laying out towels and sheets to sleep on in the stuffy heat. But it was all part of the experience and we made the best of it. Fell asleep absolutely exhausted at 9:00 pm to get up again at 4:00 am to go to see the ocean. Went to Puerto de Champerico by 6:30 am when it was already super hot. Got coffee and breakfast (eggs and beans, what else?) at a beach hut restaurant in the sand and lazed in a hammock while the kids played in the super dangerous ocean waves. Only one kid had to be rescued from the undertow by some surfer dudes. I was surprised to see how they did no head counts, never set meeting times or places, but somehow everything worked out. They started running with the torch from there, and a number of kids and teachers ran a few kilometers in the mid-day sweltering heat, carrying the Guatemalan flag and sign from their school and blowing whistles the whole time. Everywhere there are walking vendors selling flags of all sizes and these plastic whistles to make sure that every kids in Guatemala is capable making the most noise possible. Now that is patriotism. They got back on the buses, which are also decked out with Flags, and we made our way back to El Chol. We started running again in Granados at about 10:00 at night and both my site mate and I were given the opportunity to carry the torch for a bit. It¥s a funny site with a mob of kids running with matching t-shirts, headbands, all kinds of Guatemala adornments all blowing whistles like crazy and the buses following behind with horns blaring the whole way and crowds cheering everyone on. The kids take turns running and carrying the torch like a relay. We showed up in El Chol with motorcycle and tuk tuk escorts around 11:30 that night to a welcoming crowd and tons of firecrackers and more blaring horns (this is a loud country). We ended at the school where they had speeches, sang the national anthem (I think officially the longest in the world), gave everyone snacks, and then had a marimba dance. I went home to prepare for the next field trip, went to bed around 1:45 am, slept about 45 minutes, and got up to leave for the next trip.

With the high school kids we met at 3:00 am to all leave on one school bus to go to Panajachel on Lake Atitl·n. Even though it was super early in the morning, all of them were so excited to be going they had lots of energy. There was loud pumping music and giddy screaming the whole way, although in my state of exhaustion I slept through most of it. We arrived at the lake later that morning and Hannah and I had a serious need for good coffee, so we went to our favorite cafÈ owned by our South African and New York couple friends. In the mean time, the group left on a ferry to go visit the traditional town of Santiago across the lake, so we had to find a lancha to get us over there to meet back up with them. That evening the kids wanted to go out on the town to go dancing, so we went out and played a semi-chaperone role, even though some of the students are our age. We had a lot of fun dancing with our students and seeing them enjoying themselves outside of small El Chol. The next day (the 14th) we took off around noon and made our way down the inter-American highway towards El Chol. The whole way were other school groups carrying the torch so traffic was completely snarled and every vehicle had Guatemalan flags plastered all over it and it. The kids were actually running on the highway with trucks passing them and everything. Everyone was madly honking in both encouragement and frustration, not a day to be traveling for any reason other than to be carrying a torch. It was the craziest in Chimaltenango, a major town on the highway that you have to pass through no matter where you are going. There were tons of crowds lining the highway and we were crawling along at the pace of the runners. As is the tradition, everyone throws water at the runners and at the buses, we’re talking bags of waters, buckets, and hoses. It was chaos with the mucic, the whistles, the screaming, and the water coming from every person in every direction. The doors and the windows of the bus were open, so we weren’t spared the soaking. The ayudante of the bus kept filling up a bucket and chucking it around inside the bus so everything was soaked, including all of our backpacks. The kids inside the bus were also spraying Coca Cola and orange soda to top it off. Nuts. It was literally like we’d been swimming with our clothes and our shoes on. We made it to San Juan Sacatequez around 5:00 from where they started running. It took seven hours to run the 47 kilometers (28 miles) back to El Chol, going super slow and freezing cold from being wet so long. It was a strange mix of horrible suffering from being tired, wet, cold, bored, and going deaf but also just sheer amazement of the kids energy, patriotism, and excitement and just how cool it was to be witnessing such a unique cultural experience. There were kids running the whole way with the torch. I took my turn and ran for a good 5 km. It was a cool experience running with that energy down the dirt mountain road in pitch darkness with only the light of the moon. Every so often you’d get surprise water thrown at you from the darkness by someone on a hill above or a house behind the trees. As we got closer to El Chol, there were people from there waiting on motorcycles to accompany us back and when we finally arrived in town after midnight, all of us running at the end, the whole town was there to greet us with cheering and more firecrackers. There was a stage set up in the central park and again, speeches (the mentioned the participation of the Peace Corps volunteers) and hoopla. The torch was presented to the mayor and there was a live band, tamales for the whole town, and several drunks stumbling about. People stayed and carried on til 3:00 am, which I could hear all of it from my house nearby.

The next day was Independence Day, the parade of all the schools started at 9:00 am with each group of kids in uniforms or costumes, some behind pickups with large speakers blaring music, others in school bands complete with drums and chimes. After the parade, my coworkers and I handed out 400 copies of the latest municipal newsletter to everyone in the park. After that, we handed out snacks of cookies and juice to the hundreds of kids who had participated in the parade, as it was mid-day and super hot by that point. In the afternoon there was a soccer tournament for men, and one game for women in which I played and we won 3-0 and I scored a goal!

Overall the Independence Day events were lots of fun. It’s so interesting to see how other countries express their pride and patriotism. Kind of like everything in Guatemala, it was long and drawn out, but super interesting and made me feel good to be able to be a part of it all with the community.